dtSearch
Case Study
Technadyne
Engineering Consultants, Inc.
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"I particularly
like the dtSearch technical support staff" |
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Technadyne Engineering
Consultants, Inc.
SDOCS Trusts Classified Documents to dtSearch
Technadyne Engineering Consultants, Inc., based in Albuquerque,
New Mexico, provides high caliber technical and administrative
consulting services to U.S. government and state agencies, prime
government contractors, national laboratories, utilities, private,
and industrial organizations. Officially classified as a small
business, Technadyne has successfully completed over $25 million
worth of Professional and Technical Support Services (PTSS) over
the past five years and have access to some of the finest expertise
in the business.
A number of Technadyne employees helped develop the Classified
Document Control System (CDOCS) while on contract to Sandia National
Laboratories (www.sandia.gov) over the past few years. When Sandia
offered to "Tech-Transfer" CDOCS to a private company,
Technadyne obtained the license, and now offers CDOCS as SDOCS
the Secure Document Control System. The same personnel who worked
on CDOCS under contract to Sandia, now support CDOCS users and
improve SDOCS for new private and government customers.
Current classified and unclassified document management systems
require a tremendous amount of space and extensive manpower to
track, inventory, and protect documents. The main problem, however,
is the actual handling of the paper. Most paper systems suffer
from the cost of searching for and recovering the information
on the paper. The purpose of the Secure Document Control System
(SDOCS) is to eliminate the need for paper by scanning and storing
images of pages on a personal computer using high density optical
media (WORM, Read/Write, or CD-ROM) or high density, high speed
magnetic media. By saving images on the computer, manpower and
space requirements are reduced, the chance of compromise is diminished,
and the information is more readily available to the authorised
user.
The SDOCS system consists of a personal computer, a high-resolution
video display (1600 x 1200 pixels), a high-speed scanner (40
pages per minute), and a laser printer. Images are stored on
large hard drives (8GB) and can be archived to other media such
as CD-ROM. Microsoft Windows is the platform on which SDOCS operates,
with a user-friendly interface and intuitive data display. The
system operates either standalone or on a network for expanded
access. |
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"dtSearch is
much more responsive than other software companies... They're
good folks to work with." |
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Special features added early on to SDOCS include: (1) complete
record management and keyword retrieval; (2) page change management
to insert, delete, and replace pages in a document; (3) multi-level
access control to images; and (4) complete tracking and reporting
of system and document usage. To aid the system management user,
there are a myriad of additional features, including backup assistance,
exporting text files, and scanning images to TIFF files.
The latest improvements to SDOCS include the ability to recover
the text of the document images by OCR (Optical Character Recognition).
Complete image management has been added for de-skewing, de-specking,
and removing horizontal and vertical lines. The program also
has the capability to scan, display and print colour photos.
And since the ability to index all the text in the document is
an absolute necessity, there is full-text retrieval capability.
The current system, which upgrades SDOCS from a 16-bit to a 32-bit
operating environment, was delivered under tasking to the Department
of Energy's (DOE) Headquarters in Washington DC. The upgrade
enables current DOE Windows-based workstations (32-bit processors)
to utilize SDOCS software to access the classified documents
in its database. The system is being used at several locations
at DOE to manage personnel security files and security policy
documentation, to handle classified documents in the Office of
Safeguards and Security Information Management Center, and for
documentation management in the Office of Declassification. The
system also has been installed at over 50 other U.S. locations,
including many at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque.
Other uses include timecard imaging for payroll applications,
and Contract Staff Augmentation.
In searching for a library of indexing functions for the 32-bit
version of SDOCS, Technadyne looked for a royalty-free package
that would provide clean, fast indexing, and help with programming
useful user interfaces. Technadyne wanted the ability to display
the location of text-hits, both in the text display window, and
in the scanned document pages. Technadyne needed to allow the
user to compose Boolean-logic text queries without knowledge
of Boolean logic. Finally, the package Technadyne chose had to
integrate easily into our Microsoft Visual C++ application framework.
Technadyne found all these qualities in the dtSearch Text Retrieval
Engine. SDOCS uses dtSearch to index thousands of OCR text files
at a time (in a background network batch process) or to index
a single document on a users menu click. The full-text searching
integrates seamlessly with the other search criteria provided
by SDOCS, allowing the user to narrow the search until the proper
documents are located and displayed.
"I particularly like the dtSearch technical support staff,"
says Alfred Johnson, the Technadyne developer who integrated
the dtSearch engine into SDOCS. "They're much more responsive
than other software companies. Whenever I had a problem, they
supplied sample code to solve that problem. They're good folks
to work with."
To learn more about CDOCS/SDOCS and Technadyne Engineering
Consultants, Inc., visit http://www.technadyneinc.com/
or phone + 1 505-299-8697, or fax at +1 505-296-0895 |
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